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The CIA’s New
Deputy Director Ran a Black Site for Torture
By Glenn
Greenwald
February 03,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
The Intercept"
-
In May, 2013, the
Washington Post’s Greg Miller
reported that the head of the CIA’s clandestine
service was being shifted out of that position as a
result of “a management shake-up” by then-Director John
Brennan. As Miller documented, this official – whom the
paper did not name because she was a covert agent at the
time – was centrally involved in the worst abuses of
the CIA’s Bush-era torture regime.
As Miller
put it, she was “directly involved in its controversial
interrogation program” and had an “extensive role” in
torturing detainees. Even more troubling, she “had run a
secret prison in Thailand” – part of
the CIA’s network of “black sites” – “where two
detainees were subjected to waterboarding and other
harsh techniques.” The
Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture also
detailed the central role she played in the
particularly gruesome torture of detainee Abu
Zubaydah.
Beyond all
that, she played a vital role in the
destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed
the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran
and other secret agency locations. The concealment of
those interrogation tapes, which violated both
multiple court orders as well the demands of the 9/11
Commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was
condemned as “obstruction” by Commission Chairs Lee
Hamilton and Thomas Keane. A special prosecutor and
Grand Jury
investigated those actions but ultimately chose not
to prosecute.
That CIA
official’s name whose torture activities the Post
described is Gina Haspel. Today, as BuzzFeed’s Jason
Leopold
noted, CIA Director Mike Pompeo announced
that Haspel was selected by Trump to be Deputy Director
of the CIA.
This should not
come as much of a surprise given that Pompeo himself
has said he is open to resurrecting Bush-era torture
techniques (indeed, Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan,
was
forced to withdraw from the running in late
2008 because of
his
support for some of those tactics only to be
confirmed in 2013). That’s part of why it was so
controversial that 14 Democrats – including their Senate
Leader Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Sheldon
Whitehouse and Tim Kaine –
voted to confirm Pompeo.
That Haspel was
the actual subject of the 2013 Post story was an open
secret. As Leopold
said after I
named her on Twitter as the subject of that story:
“all of us who covered CIA knew. She was undercover and
agency asked us not to print her name.” Gina Haspel
is now slated to become the second-most powerful
official at the CIA despite – or because of – the
central, aggressive, sustained role she played in many
of the most grotesque and shameful abuses of the War on
Terror.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
